Monday, June 13, 2011

Chicken soup

(one question I have is: why are the labels capitalized? are they proper nouns?)

Since this is the time of exams (my wife is giving one tomorrow to local Beis Yakov girls), I will ask this in a form of an exam question.

What is the interpretation of the figure? Pick the best answer:

a) Obama's economists have proven themselves to be incompetent
b) Recovery plan at best did nothing to unemployment and at worst hurt it
c) American tax-payers were swindled out of hundreds of billions of dollars
d) American economy has been hurt by Obama, and America is on its way to becoming the Sweden of 1970s
e) This is a perfect example of a situation when doing nothing is better than doing something (which is almost always the case with the government)
f) All of the above

Romer and Bernstein defend their estimates with the argument that the economic situation turned out worse than they had anticipated; and so the economy would have done even worse without a stimulus.

I love this! Compare this to:

The spirit healer defended her treatment using burnt incense that even though the patient had flu for the same (if not longer time) as would be predicted without the incense, the illness, in fact, was much stronger than anticipated in this case, and the patient would be even sicker without the incense.

Speaking of chickens:

[E]ven if you buy the White House’s argument that the $800 billion package created 3 million jobs, that works out to $266,000 per job. Taxing or borrowing $266,000 from the private sector to create a single job is simply not a cost effective way of putting America back to work. The long-term debt burden of that $266,000 swamps any benefit that the single job created might provide.

My only question is: Obama is on his way to joining the ranks of the worst US Presidents. Right now I would rank him between FDR and JFK. When he is gone from the office, what abbreviation will they give his name and what piece of public property will they name after him? BHO sounds too similar to HBO. (On the other hand, Woody the Wilson didn't have his name abbreviated.)